Departments

Bank withdrawal

By Steve Lange

Throughout The 1920s And Early 1930s, St. Paul, well-known for its crooked coppers and blind pigs, served as the nation’s gangster safe haven. Many of the most-notorious mobsters—including at least two Public Enemy Number Ones—made more than an occasional stopover in St. Paul, which the era’s
attorney general had dubbed “the poison spot of the nation.”

And, in 1926, some of that poison trickled down to Rochester.

Just after 9 a.m. on a sunny and snowy Saturday in December 1926, four men walked into downtown Olmsted County Bank and Trust, located at 111 South Broadway.

Five minutes later and $30,000 richer, they sped south down Broadway in a “high-powered blue Chrysler” as two policemen lay shot and bleeding on the sidewalk.

Rochester police gave chase in Yellow Cabs and cars commandeered from private citizens. The department did not yet own a police car, only a motorcycle with a sidecar.

Here’s how it went down: The four men entered the bank and were greeted at the door by bank president C. F. Dabelstein. One of the men promptly hit Dabelstein in the head with a revolver butt, knocking him to the floor. Three of the men—“with revolvers in each hand”—fired in all directions and forced bank employees to lie on the floor as a fourth bandit moved behind the cages, grabbing money and shoving it into a white canvas bag. They ordered Dabelstein to open the vault. He told them it was already open, and they “relieved it of considerable currency and Liberty bonds.”

Out front, a fifth man with an automatic rifle and a sawed-off shotgun guarded the bank entrance, yelling “Let’s go, the bulls are coming!” as a Rochester police officer responded to the
newly-installed silent alarm tripped by one of the tellers. Patrolman Chester Fellows fired a pair of shots as the robbers left the bank, then fell to the sidewalk with buckshot from the shotgun in both legs. After “jamming the bulky bag” into the Chrysler, the robbers sped south on Broadway then turned west on Second Street.

Patrolman Willis Hutchins, waiting at the corner at the Knowlton store, opened fire on the car. Gang members fired back, and a .32-caliber bullet tore through the calf of Hutchins’ right leg, just missing the bone. He dropped to the ground, leaving a pool of blood on the snowy sidewalk. Another shot from the speeding car shattered a plate glass window at Knowlton’s. A stuffed Teddy bear in a Christmas display was hit in the neck area.  

The Post-Bulletin billed it as “The first thrilling daylight robbery Rochester has ever experienced.”

Both officers recovered at Colonial Hospital.

In 1929, small-time crook Tony Serpa was the only man convicted in the Rochester robbery. He served 11 years.

Many believe the heist was masterminded by Harvey Bailey. Bailey, called the “dean of American bank robbers,” was a staple of a loose affiliation of bandits and burglars—sometimes known as the “Holden-Keating gang”—who made the Midwest bank-robbing rounds throughout the 1920s. Bailey used St. Paul as a home base for money laundering.

Bailey was suspected in the Great Denver Mint Robbery of 1922, in which five men, with sawed-off shotguns blazing, snatched $200,000 in new five-dollar bills in a “daring daylight raid.” Bailey’s gang robbed a pair of Minnesota banks—the Bank of Sturgis in 1928, the Bank of Willmar in 1930—and a half dozen more in Iowa and Indiana. In 1930, bandits (by all accounts Bailey) stole $2.7 million from the Lincoln National Bank and Trust in Nebraska, the largest bank robbery at the time.

Bailey—a golfer who was one of many gangsters who teed it up regularly on St. Paul’s Keller Golf Course—was eventually arrested (with Jimmy Keating and Thomas Holden) on a Kansas City golf course in 1932. Bailey was convicted of bank robbery and spent 30 years in prison, including a stint in Alcatraz. He was paroled in 1964, married in 1966, and died in Missouri in 1979 at age 91 after a second career as a cabinet maker. Bailey’s biography, published in 1973, is entitled Robbing Banks Was My Business.

In the mid-1930s, the Olmsted County Bank and Trust Co. moved around the corner to Second Street Southwest, now the home of McGoon’s/Goonie’s Comedy Club. The site of the
robbery, 111 South Broadway, is now the entrance to the Shops at University Square.